This site's purpose is to serve as a hub for all my project and any other niche side interests I aquire throughtout my academic future. The idea came to me after a very helpful upperclassman teacher's assistant in my digital systems class. His site contained a course guide that he made for future undergraduates that contained simply written course summaries and tips about professors. This saved me. I had chosen to abandon the recommended course order due to some AP credit and we feeling completely lost. I decided to emulate his project and hopefully accumulate something that would help other CompE students at UMass.
Why bother with all that code?
Here's why this wasn't a good idea: This site was built using a very helpful template I found online, so it isn't really unique. It is a total pain to manually go into the code files in order to write a project summary, instead
of editing a wix page. It is especially a pain to figure out how to center all these text boxes and photos (an infamous web dev headache) and make everything look pretty. This could have
been a collection of word docs and canva designs popped into google slide, or even a wordpress site. Heck, I could've even had github copilot or blackbox AI write something for me.
Why you should also do this: I chose to do this the spring of my freshman year to get myself more comfortable working in IDE's and to teach myself GIT. Coding is really intimidating and this project served as an "I can do this" start to my
journey of programming. Having a project under your belt that you can say is yours feels really good. I remember putting the finishing touches on it before I had my first tech job
interview and getting asked about it during the sit-down with my future boss. I can't really say for sure if having this site was the deciding factor that got me the job, but the confidence
I gained from it helped me do more web dev work in that position. Learning how to navigate github and working with git was a huge plus for sure.